Applied Predictive Technologies CEO Anthony Bruce tells Business Insider he favours this question as a means of testing a candidate's analytical skills. The point is not to come up with the actual answer, but to explain the factors you would need to consider (how often hamburgers would be eaten, how that might vary between rural and urban areas, and how much they would sell for).

The obvious smart-aleck answer is "I would use Google to find out", but that's not likely to get you very far, since the data either may not exist online or may only be in a language you don't understand. (If Mandarin is one of your skills, then by all means bring that up).

Comments

... which might not work out well for you because the question was "how many dollars' *worth*", clearly indicating that you will need to make some kind of conversation in the process.

the better route to be a smart smart-ass would have been better to take issue with the fact that there are numerous dollars" currencies - Singapore is geographically closest, while US dollars are the generally accepted global currency, however the question was posed in Australia.

already winning before even getting into the intended scope of the question

as it is a joke question, would reply with something along the lines of

well, lets take the square root of 4.62 and multiply it by 2 billion, then make an allowance of poor people calling it P and people that are over 2 km/s from a mcdonalds calling that O
your answer is 26.8 million.

None of these interview questions are "killer". They won't tell you anything more about a person than you can find out with non-novelty strategic questioning. HR is more an art than a science, let's face it. These annoying questions just give employers a false impression that they somehow have an 'inside track'. I can't help but feel that in a way it's just taking the piss out of the applicant who's invested their time and effort to get there in the first place, only to be met with these pseudo insigtful questions that are no better than those facebook truisms that people constantly repost.

Does this company sell burgers in China or is planning to sell burgers in China?

if the answer is 'No'... then my response is 'Who cares?"

Yeah, I'm not very good at job interviews. I've gotten every single job I've ever had through central govt. staffing (education dept.) , being there in the right place at the right time (cold calling my resume at Greater Union for a Cinema Usher - and getting lucky that the previous usher had just got the sack an hour before), or through friends and contacts (freelance graphic work)